Saddam Captured!

[A Black Falcon]

How are you so sure that it used to be so much better? I'm not... were public schools once far more effective and successful? I'm doubtful. Sure, some schools have problems, but most of that can be attributed to lack of funds, not lack of teaching... though yes, some schools are just bad even with more money and should be improved. But I wouldn't use the true problem schools as representative of the public school system. The biggest problem in public education is chronic and long-term underfunding, which has been going on for decades and continues to be a major issue. This, of course, is due to state and local underfunding as well as national, but national is a huge piece of the pie...

As for this "No Child Left Behind" thing to try to raise school standards, it is a bad law. It is biased strongly against rural areas and requires high levels of compliance among specific subgroups. Now in cities that's fine, but in the country like here those groups often have just a couple of people in them... if just a couple of people miss the test then the school could fail... it seems to me to be a thinly veiled attempt to get every single school in the country to fail and give as much money as possible to religious schools, because the standards as they are set are not even remotely realistic.

Oh, and as for discipline, if the price of not letting teachers hit their students is slightly less performance, then it's worth it since that kind of discipline should definitely not be allowed in schools.